After Repeal of Obamacare: Moving to Patient-Centered, Market-Based Health Care

HERITAGE FOUNDATION RESEARCH
Abstract: Obamacare moves American health care in the wrong direction by eroding the doctor–patient relationship, centralizing control, and increasing health costs. True health care reform would empower individuals, with their doctors, to make their own health care decisions free from government interference. Therefore, Obamacare should be stopped and fully repealed. Then Congress and the states should enact patient-centered, market-based reforms that better serve Americans.

Read more at Heritage.org

Note: Many of the solutions this Heritage paper presents are solutions Republicans have submitted in various bills since the healthcare debate began. Harry Reid and Senate Democrats have refused to consider free-market solutions, while the president deceitfully claims that Republicans have not offered any solutions for greater coverage and health care reform. --bc Read More......

Free or Equal - A personal view by Johan Norberg

Program Summary: "In 1980 economist and Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman inspired market reform in the West and revolutions in the East with his celebrated television series “Free To Choose.” ✧ Thirty years later, in this one-hour documentary, the young Swedish writer, analyst and Cato Foundation Fellow Johan Norberg travels in Friedman’s footsteps to see what has actually happened in the places Friedman’s ideas helped transform. In location after location Norberg examines the contemporary relevance or Friedman’s ideas in the 2011 world of globalization and financial crisis. Central to his examination are the perennial questions concerning power and prosperity, and the trade-offs between individual liberty and income equality." ✧ Watch the 17-minute video preview at Free to Choose Media. Read More......

Health Care: Price Competition Can Lead to Quality Competition

HEARTLAND INSTITUTE by John C. Goodman, President and CEO of the National Center for Policy Analysis - [Excerpt] "Wherever there is price competition, there also tends to be quality competition. In the market for Lasik surgery, for example, patients can choose traditional Lasik or more advanced custom Wavefront Lasik. Prices range from less than $1,000 to more than $3,000 per eye. In the international medical tourism market, some hospitals in India, Thailand, and Singapore disclose their infection, mortality, and readmission rates and compare them to such U.S. entities as the Cleveland Clinic and the Mayo Clinic." Read full article at Heartland.org... Read More......

Obama: Toward a 21st-Century Regulatory System

WALL STREET JOURNAL/OPINION, 1/18/2011 by Barack Obama - For two centuries, America's free market has not only been the source of dazzling ideas and path-breaking products, it has also been the greatest force for prosperity the world has ever known. That vibrant entrepreneurialism is the key to our continued global leadership and the success of our people.

But throughout our history, one of the reasons the free market has worked is that we have sought the proper balance. We have preserved freedom of commerce while applying those rules and regulations necessary to protect the public against threats to our health and safety and to safeguard people and businesses from abuse. Read more at WSJ... Read More......

The Obama Experts vs. the Rule of Law

HERITAGE FOUNDATION/FOUNDRY/MORNING BELL, 10/4/2010 - Last week President Barack Obama’s most recently minted czar, Special Advisor to the President for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Elizabeth Warren, spoke to 400 bankers at the swanky Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Washington, DC. Her message, according to The Washington Post: “Behave, play nice, and we’ll get along just fine.” Specifically, Warren promised to take a more “principles-based approach” to regulation, rather than clearly articulating “thou shalt not” rules that banks could rely on. For this Progressive White House, an enlightened expert, like Warren, given broad new powers by an unaccountably vague statute is exactly what the federal government needs to enforce order on our complex modern world. For our Founding Fathers, however, everything about Warren, from the way she attained her new powers to the way she plans to use them, is antithetical to our nation’s First Principles and the United States Constitution. Read more at the Foundry... Read More......

What They Told Us: Reviewing Last Week’s Key Polls

RASMUSSEN REPORTS, 7/24/2010 - One of the key issues in the political debate now roiling the country is how big a part government should play in our lives. ∴ And on this topic there is a huge gap between the Political Class and the rest of the nation. ∴ Seventy-five percent (75%) of voters prefer free markets over a government-managed economy. But a plurality of the Political Class takes the opposite view. Read more at Rasmussen's... Read More......

Grassroots Activists Help Launch Historic “Contract from America”

THECONTRACT.ORG, NEWS RELEASE, 4/14/2010 - On April 15th, hundreds of local Tea Party and limited government groups around the country will join together to announce the launch of the “Contract from America,” a grassroots legislative blueprint for 2010 and beyond. Originally proposed by Ryan Hecker, a Houston Tea Party activist and National Coordinator for the initiative’s chief organizing group Tea Party Patriots, this project is intended to present a different kind of agenda for our federal lawmakers: unlike the Contract with America introduced in the 1990s, everyday citizens proposed and voted on every plank of the Contract from America. Read more about the launch at The Contract.org...

Sign The Contract from America HERE.

Read the contract...

The Contract from America

We, the citizens of the United States of America, call upon those seeking to represent us in public office to sign the Contract from America and by doing so commit to support each of its agenda items and advocate on behalf of individual liberty, limited government, and economic freedom.

Individual Liberty

Our moral, political, and economic liberties are inherent, not granted by our government. It is essential to the practice of these liberties that we be free from restriction over our peaceful political expression and free from excessive control over our economic choices.

Limited Government

The purpose of our government is to exercise only those limited powers that have been relinquished to it by the people, chief among these being the protection of our liberties by administering justice and ensuring our safety from threats arising inside or outside our country’s sovereign borders. When our government ventures beyond these functions and attempts to increase its power over the marketplace and the economic decisions of individuals, our liberties are diminished and the probability of corruption, internal strife, economic depression, and poverty increases.

Economic Freedom

The most powerful, proven instrument of material and social progress is the free market. The market economy, driven by the accumulated expressions of individual economic choices, is the only economic system that preserves and enhances individual liberty. Any other economic system, regardless of its intended pragmatic benefits, undermines our fundamental rights as free people.

1. Protect the Constitution

Require each bill to identify the specific provision of the Constitution that gives Congress the power to do what the bill does. (82.03%)

2. Reject Cap & Trade

Stop costly new regulations that would increase unemployment, raise consumer prices, and weaken the nation’s global competitiveness with virtually no impact on global temperatures. (72.20%)

3. Demand a Balanced Budget

Begin the Constitutional amendment process to require a balanced budget with a two-thirds majority needed for any tax hike. (69.69%)

4. Enact Fundamental Tax Reform

Adopt a simple and fair single-rate tax system by scrapping the internal revenue code and replacing it with one that is no longer than 4,543 words—the length of the original Constitution. (64.90%)

5. Restore Fiscal Responsibility & Constitutionally Limited Government in Washington

Create a Blue Ribbon taskforce that engages in a complete audit of federal agencies and programs, assessing their Constitutionality, and identifying duplication, waste, ineffectiveness, and agencies and programs better left for the states or local authorities, or ripe for wholesale reform or elimination due to our efforts to restore limited government consistent with the US Constitution’s meaning. (63.37%)

6. End Runaway Government Spending

Impose a statutory cap limiting the annual growth in total federal spending to the sum of the inflation rate plus the percentage of population growth. (56.57%)

7. Defund, Repeal, & Replace Government-run Health Care

Defund, repeal and replace the recently passed government-run health care with a system that actually makes health care and insurance more affordable by enabling a competitive, open, and transparent free-market health care and health insurance system that isn’t restricted by state boundaries. (56.39%)

8. Pass an ‘All-of-the-Above” Energy Policy

Authorize the exploration of proven energy reserves to reduce our dependence on foreign energy sources from unstable countries and reduce regulatory barriers to all other forms of energy creation, lowering prices and creating competition and jobs. (55.51%)

9. Stop the Pork

Place a moratorium on all earmarks until the budget is balanced, and then require a 2/3 majority to pass any earmark. (55.47%)

10. Stop the Tax Hikes

Permanently repeal all tax hikes, including those to the income, capital gains, and death taxes, currently scheduled to begin in 2011. (53.38%)

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Get involved. Sign the Contract. Join the movement. Make sure your voice and your priorities are heard. Together, we can and will make a difference.

Read More......

Why Washington Can't Reform Healthcare

RealClearMarkets, 2/15/2010 by Bill Frezza - [If you really believe in free-markets, this short piece is for you!] Read the entire article here.

Healthcare prices are fake, inflexible, and inflated because they are set not by the repeated interactions of buyers and sellers but by opaque acts of collusion between government bureaucrats and special interests. Even if this system were run by a benevolent genius who happened to set prices exactly "right" - whatever that means - these prices would be obsolete the moment they were published.

Read More......

Government Unions Win, You Lose

THE FOUNDRY/Morning Bell at Heritage Foundation, 1/25/2010 - Since President Barack Obama was sworn into office, the U.S. economy has shed 3.4 million jobs and the unemployment rate has risen to 10%. But not all sectors of the economy have been suffering equally. In fact, the sector of the economy most supportive of President Obama has not only avoided contraction, but has actually managed to grow instead. ∴ According to a report released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) last Friday, in 2009 the number of federal, state and local government employees represented by unions actually rose by 64,000. Coupled with union losses in the private sector economy, 2009 became the first year in American history that a majority of American union members work for the government. Specifically, 52% of all union members now work for the federal, state or local government, up from 49% in 2008. Or, to better illustrate these statistics: three times more union members work in the Post Office than in the auto industry. ∴ So what? Why should Americans care if unions are now dominated by workers who get their paychecks from governments, instead of workers who get their paychecks from private firms? There’s one simple reason: private firms face competition; governments don’t. Read more at the Foundry... Read More......

Government is the problem, not the answer, to nation's ills

CORVALLIS GAZETTE-TIMES/LETTERS, 10/22/2009 by Jeff Limón - I can see from Rich Bergeman's Oct. 16 letter "GOP puts party before country and ends up hurting both" that Mr. Bergeman has a great respect for the truth, because he uses it so sparingly. It is true that George Bush was not a champion of limiting the powers of government to those strictly specified in the Constitution. Further, Republicans were unhappy with the Bush bailouts, which, with unemployment still hovering around 10 percent one year later, have failed to end this recession. ∴ But as far as truth goes, that's about it. ∴ The notion that the Republican Party hates America is absolutely preposterous. The bottom line is that we believe increasing freedom and liberty help all Americans, and that government intrusion is never the answer, it's the problem. For example, we oppose government involvement in health care because we believe that such a system will be about as compassionate as the IRS and will have the efficiency of the Post Office.


One only need look as far as Canada, where the average wait time for the 12 most popular specialties is 18 weeks (four months), to see just how bad things can get. Government involvement in the British health care system, where a dentist may spend a whole 5 minutes on a yearly teeth cleaning, and anesthesia is almost non-existent, the dental care industry has been ruined.

The idea that free-markets, personal liberties, and a government that serves you instead of demanding your obedience are harmful America, is simply rubbish.

Jeff Limon, Corvallis Read More......

1958 Essay: I, Pencil

THE ADVOCATES.ORG, I, Pencil by Leonard E. Read, first published in 1958

"I, Pencil, simple though I appear to be, merit your wonder and awe, a claim I shall attempt to prove. In fact, if you can understand me -- no, that's too much to ask of anyone -- if you can become aware of the miraculousness which I symbolize, you can help save the freedom mankind is so unhappily losing."

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I, Pencil

I am a lead pencil--the ordinary wooden pencil familiar to all boys and girls and adults who can read and write.

Writing is both my vocation and my avocation; that's all I do.

You may wonder why I should write a genealogy. Well, to begin with, my story is interesting. And, next, I am a mystery -- more so than a tree or a sunset or even a flash of lightning. But, sadly, I am taken for granted by those who use me, as if I were a mere incident and without background. This supercilious attitude relegates me to the level of the commonplace. This is a species of the grievous error in which mankind cannot too long persist without peril. For, the wise G. K. Chesterton observed, "We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders."

I, Pencil, simple though I appear to be, merit your wonder and awe, a claim I shall attempt to prove. In fact, if you can understand me -- no, that's too much to ask of anyone -- if you can become aware of the miraculousness which I symbolize, you can help save the freedom mankind is so unhappily losing. I have a profound lesson to teach. And I can teach this lesson better than can an automobile or an airplane or a mechanical dishwasher because -- well, because I am seemingly so simple.

Simple? Yet, not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me. This sounds fantastic, doesn't it? Especially when it is realized that there are about one and one-half billion of my kind produced in the U.S.A. each year.

Pick me up and look me over. What do you see? Not much meets the eye -- there's some wood, lacquer. the printed labeling, graphite lead, a bit of metal, and an eraser.
Innumerable Antecedents
Just as you cannot trace your family tree back very far, so is it impossible for me to name and explain all my antecedents. But I would like to suggest enough of them to impress upon you the richness and complexity of my background.

My family tree begins with what in fact is a tree, a cedar of straight grain that grows in Northern California and Oregon. Now contemplate all the saws and trucks and rope and the countless other gear used in harvesting and carting the cedar logs to the railroad siding. Think of all the persons and the numberless skills that went into their fabrication: the mining of ore, the making of steel and its refinement into saws, axes, motors: the growing of hemp and bringing it through all the stages to heavy and strong rope; the logging camps with their beds and mess halls, the cookery and the raising of all the foods. Why, untold thousands of persons had a hand in every cup of coffee the loggers drink!

The logs are shipped to a mill in San Leandro, California. Can you imagine the individuals who make flat cars and rails and railroad engines and who construct and install the communication systems incidental thereto? These legions are among my antecedents.

Consider the millwork in San Leandro. The cedar logs are cut into small, pencil-length slats less than one-fourth of an inch in thickness. These are kiln dried and then tinted for the same reason women put rouge on their faces. People prefer that I look pretty, not a pallid white. The slats are waxed and kiln dried again. How many skills went into the making of the tint and the kilns, into supplying the heat, the light and power, the belts, motors, and all the other things a mill requires? Sweepers in the mill among my ancestors? Yes, and included are the men who poured the concrete for the dam of a Pacific Gas & Electric Company hydroplant which supplies the mill's power!

Don't overlook the ancestors present and distant who have a hand in transporting sixty carloads of slats across the nation.

Once in the pencil factory -- $4,000,000 in machinery and building, all capital accumulated by thrifty and saving parents of mine -- each slat is given eight grooves by a complex machine, after which another machine lays leads in every other slat, applies glue, and places another slat atop -- a lead sandwich, so to speak. Seven brothers and I are mechanically carved from this "wood-clinched" sandwich. My "lead" itself -- it contains no lead at all -- is complex. The graphite is mined in Ceylon. Consider these miners and those who make their many tools and the makers of the paper sacks in which the graphite is shipped and those who make the string that ties the sacks and those who put them aboard ships and those who make the ships. Even the lighthouse keepers along the way assisted in my birth -- and the harbor pilots.

The graphite is mixed with clay from Mississippi in which ammonium hydroxide is used in the refining process. Then wetting agents are added such as sulfonated tallow -- animal fats chemically reacted with sulfuric acid. After passing through numerous machines, the mixture finally appears as endless extrusions -- as from a sausage grinder -- cut to size, dried, and baked for several hours at 1,850 degrees Fahrenheit. To increase their strength and smoothness the leads are then treated with a hot mixture which includes candelilla wax from Mexico, paraffin wax, and hydrogenated natural fats.

My cedar receives six coats of lacquer. Do you know all the ingredients of lacquer? Who would think that the growers of castor beans and the refiners of castor oil are a part of it? They are. Why, even the processes by which the lacquer is made a beautiful yellow involves the skills of more persons than one can enumerate!

Observe the labeling. That's a film formed by applying heat to carbon black mixed with resins. How do you make resins and what, pray, is carbon black?

My bit of metal -- the ferrule -- is brass. Think of all the persons who mine zinc and copper and those who have the skills to make shiny sheet brass from these products of nature. Those black rings on my ferrule are black nickel. What is black nickel and how is it applied? The complete story of why the center of my ferrule has no black nickel on it would take pages to explain

Then there`s my crowning glory, inelegantly referred to in the trade as "the plug," the part man uses to erase the errors he makes with me. An ingredient called "factice" is what does the erasing. It is a rubber-like product made by reacting rape-seed oil from the Dutch East indies with sulfur chloride. Rubber, contrary to the common notion, is only for binding purposes. Then, too, there are numerous vulcanizing and accelerating agents. The pumice comes from Italy; and the pigment which gives "the plug" its color is cadmium sulfide.
No One Knows
Does anyone wish to challenge my earlier assertion that no single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me?

Actually, millions of human beings have had a hand in my creation, no one of whom even knows more than a very few of the others. Now, you may say that I go too far in relating the picker of a coffee berry in far off Brazil and food growers elsewhere to my creation; that this is an extreme position. I shall stand by my claim. There isn't a single person in all these millions, including the president of the pencil company, who contributes more than a tiny, infinitesimal bit of know-how. From the standpoint of know-how the only difference between the miner of graphite in Ceylon and the logger in Oregon is in the type of know-how. Neither the miner nor the logger can be dispensed with, any more than can the chemist at the factory or the worker in the oil field -- paraffin being a by-product of petroleum.

Here is an astounding fact: Neither the worker in the oil field nor the chemist nor the digger of graphite or clay nor any who mans or makes the ships or trains or trucks nor the one who runs the machine that does the knurling on my bit of metal nor the president of the company performs his singular task because he wants me. Each one wants me less, perhaps, than does a child in the first grade. Indeed, there are some among this vast multitude who never saw a pencil nor would they know how to use one. Their motivation is other than me. Perhaps it is something like this: Each of these millions sees that he can thus exchange his tiny know-how for the goods and services he needs or wants. I may or may not be among these items.
No Master Mind
There is a fact still more astounding: The absence of a master mind, of anyone dictating or forcibly directing these countless actions which bring me into being. No trace of such a person can be found. Instead, we find the Invisible Hand at work. This is the mystery to which I earlier referred.

It has been said that "only God can make a tree." Why do we agree with this? Isn't it because we realize that we ourselves could not make one? Indeed, can we even describe a tree? We cannot, except in superficial terms. We can say, for instance, that a certain molecular configuration manifests itself as a tree. But what mind is there among men that could even record, let alone direct, the constant changes in molecules that transpire in the life span of a tree? Such a feat is utterly unthinkable!

I, Pencil, am a complex combination of miracles: a tree, zinc, copper, graphite, and so on. But to these miracles which manifest themselves in Nature an even more extraordinary miracle has been added: the configuration of creative human energies -- millions of tiny know-hows configurating naturally and spontaneously in response to human necessity and desire and in the absence of any human master-minding! Since only God can make a tree, I insist that only God could make me. Man can no more direct these millions of know-hows to bring me into being than he can put molecules together to create a tree.

The above is what I meant when writing, "if you can become aware of the miraculousness which I symbolize, you can help save the freedom mankind is so unhappily losing" For, if one is aware that these know-hows will naturally, yea, automatically, arrange themselves into creative and productive patterns in response to human necessity and demand-that is, in the absence of governmental or any other coercive master-minding -- then one will possess an absolutely essential ingredient for freedom: a faith in free people. Freedom is impossible without this faith.

Once government has had a monopoly of a creative activity such, for instance, as the delivery of the mails, most individuals will believe that the mails could not be efficiently delivered by men acting freely. And here is the reason: Each one acknowledges that he himself doesn't know how to do all the things incident to mail delivery. He also recognizes that no other individual could do it. These assumptions are correct. No individual possesses enough know-how to perform a nation's mail delivery any more than any individual possesses enough know-how to make a pencil. Now, in the absence of faith in free people -- in the unawareness that millions of tiny know-hows would naturally and miraculously form and cooperate to satisfy this necessity -- the individual cannot help but reach the erroneous conclusion that mail can be delivered only by governmental "master- minding."
Testimony Galore
If I, Pencil, were the only item that could offer testimony on what men and women can accomplish when free to try, then those with little faith would have a fair case. However, there is testimony galore: it's all about us and on every hand. Mail delivery is exceedingly simple when compared, for instance, to the making of an automobile or a calculating machine or a grain combine or a milling machine or to tens of thousands of other things. Delivery? Why, in this area where men have been left free to try, they deliver the human voice around the world in less than one second: they deliver an event visually and in motion to any person's home when it is happening; they deliver 150 passengers from Seattle to Baltimore in less than four hours; they deliver gas from Texas to one's range or furnace in New York at unbelievably low rates and without subsidy: they deliver each four pounds of oil from the Persian Gulf to our Eastern Seaboard -- halfway around the world -- for less money than the government charges for delivering a one-ounce letter across the street!

The lesson I have to teach is this: Leave all creative energies uninhibited. Merely organize society to act in harmony with this lesson. Let society's legal apparatus remove all obstacles the best it can. Permit these creative know-hows freely to flow. Have faith that free men and women will respond to the Invisible Hand. This faith will be confirmed. I, Pencil, seemingly simple though I am, offer the miracle of my creation as testimony that this is a practical faith, as practical as the sun, the rain, a cedar tree, the good earth.

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Leonard E. Read (1898-1983) founded the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) in 1946 and served as its president until his death. "I, Pencil," his most famous essay, was first published in the December 1958 issue of The Freeman. Read More......

Uninsured in America

By Stuart Browning - Visit FreeMarketCure.com
(Figures presented in this video are shown below the fold)

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Data presented in this video:
Claim: 45 million Americans are uninsured

• 17 million live in households with yearly average incomes of $50,000 (38%)
  
• 9 million live in households with yearly average incomes of $75,000
  
• 18 million are the "Young Invincibles," age 18-34 who spend 4 times as much on alcohol, tobacco, entertainment and dining out as they would spend on health insurance (40%)
  
• 14 million of the uninsured are eligible for Medicade or SCHIP but choose to opt out (31%)
  
• 12 million illegal immigrants have no health care insurance but cannot be turned away from health care
  
• With "Compassionate Entry," Mexican citizens living in Mexico can receive free health care in border states

This leaves 8 million people of the claimed 45 million who are actually uninsured in America and either fall through the cracks and don't get health care or refuse treatment.

Claim: The numbers of "Uninsured in America" are exaggerated by advocates of universal (or nationalized) health care. Read More......